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If you like Cinnamon, I recommend you installing it. It's not unstable, at least on my computer -and all the modern environments tend to be laggy on it! I'd say it's even less buggy than MATE... I installed MATE because of I like the old Gnome 2 layout, but sometimes I'd like to switch to Cinnamon because there're some very uggly and buggy things So, use whatever you like. Choice is one of the benefits of Linux Mint!

cinnamon-2d is not an alternative (at least not a viable one); in 2d mode all the rendering will be done by the cpu solving one problem (the dependency of good graphics drivers stack) but creating another (heavy load on the cpu and eventually slowness depending on the cpu power)

- Rethink Cinnamon 2D, fallback to a non-shadow CPU-less intensive session in software rendering mode and/or Muffin/OpenBox (whatever happens, the user should know he's not running the "real" Cinnamon, he should be told why, and he should find himself with a working WM (even a minimalistic one like OpenBox)).

Getting back to OP's question; you should be able to install Cinnamon as an additional desktop environment on Linux Mint MATE, but it may not give you as fully integrated or as suave an experience as installing Linux Mint Cinnamon. If you want to add Cinnamon to Linux Mint MATE, install the cinnamon, cinnamon-themes, and mint-artwork-cinnamon packages. Recommend you use apt for that from the terminal, and you save the output so you can ask for support here if anything doesn't work quite right yet. You can copy text to/from the terminal, see its Edit menu.

After installation, you should be able to choose to run a Cinnamon session from the login screen (see controls at the bottom).

You could also install Linux Mint Cinnamon alongside your current Linux Mint MATE installation, in its own partition. This way, if you want to continue with only MATE or Cinnamon at some future date, you can just remove either the one or the other partition and increase the remaining partition to absorb the freed up disk space.

Vincent Vermeulen wrote:Getting back to OP's question; you should be able to install Cinnamon as an additional desktop environment on Linux Mint MATE, but it may not give you as fully integrated or as suave an experience as installing Linux Mint Cinnamon. If you want to add Cinnamon to Linux Mint MATE, install the cinnamon, cinnamon-themes, and mint-artwork-cinnamon packages. Recommend you use apt for that from the terminal, and you save the output so you can ask for support here if anything doesn't work quite right yet. You can copy text to/from the terminal, see its Edit menu.

After installation, you should be able to choose to run a Cinnamon session from the login screen (see controls at the bottom).

You could also install Linux Mint Cinnamon alongside your current Linux Mint MATE installation, in its own partition. This way, if you want to continue with only MATE or Cinnamon at some future date, you can just remove either the one or the other partition and increase the remaining partition to absorb the freed up disk space.

Why not just install mint-meta-cinnamon ? I thought that was proper way to avoid duplicate entries? It worked for me.

I don't think mint-meta-cinnamon is a good suggestion. Last time I tried to add KDE to Cinnamon by installing mint-meta-kde, Synaptic failed to install mint-info-kde, because it conflicts with mint-info-cinnamon which couldn't be removed. After that, every time I installed a package I got an error after they were installed: Failed to process mint-meta-kde.

abnvolk wrote:I don't think mint-meta-cinnamon is a good suggestion. Last time I tried to add KDE to Cinnamon by installing mint-meta-kde, Synaptic failed to install mint-info-kde, because it conflicts with mint-info-cinnamon which couldn't be removed. After that, every time I installed a package I got an error after they were installed: Failed to process mint-meta-kde.

I believe that has to do KDE and cinnamon are built with two different tookits (QT vs GTK). Mate and cinnamon are both use GTK. I installed Cinnamon with no problem on LM 13 Mate but my computer's specs made cinnamon run too slow for liking. I never treid Cinnamon 2d since I'm happy with MATE. I haven't heard of any problems with people using mint-meta cinnamon you experience may be just KDE specific.